Ranking the Best Fitness Trackers for Women of 2020

Fitness trackers for women keep up with various fitness metrics, like the number of steps you take or the distance of your run. Typically, they come in the form of a watch you wear on your wrist, which can track your steps and location.

We took a look at some of the most popular fitness trackers on the market to help you decide which one is the best option for you.

Rankings

1. Garmin Fenix 5X Sapphire

Garmin Fenix 5X Sapphire

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This fitness tracker has all the features you could need and then some. It comes with a GPS tracking system and many preloaded run profiles, allowing for fast and accurate tracking. This tracker can also sync to your phone for notifications and can access apps from the IQ store.

Garmin’s Fenix 5X Sapphire is also by far one of the most accurate trackers out there. For these reasons, it’s our #1 pick.

2. Bellabeat Leaf Nature Smart Jewelry Health Tracker

Bellabeat Leaf Nature Smart Jewelry Health Tracker

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While most trackers are watches, Bellabeat can be used as a watch or a necklace and uses your smartphone to help track your fitness and health.

While you can’t use it for more specific fitness activities, but it can track your steps, distance, calories, sleep, and more.

3. Fitbit Inspire HR Heart Rate & Fitness Tracker

Fitbit Inspire HR Heart Rate & Fitness Tracker

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Fitbit is one of the most well-known names in the tracking industry.

The Fitbit Inspire HR is one of the less expensive models, though it still can track your sleep, automatically record workouts, and has a 5-day battery life.

4. Fitbit Versa Smart Watch

Fitbit Versa Smart Watch

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Fitbit’s Versa is a little more expensive but comes with more features. It can store 300 songs, plays on-screen workouts for you to follow, and tracks all your daily activities.

Of course, you can also sync it with your smartphone to receive notifications straight to your wrist.

5. Polar M430 GPS Running Watch

Polar M430 GPS Running Watch

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With an integrated GPS system, the Polar M430 tracker is designed to help track your runs.

It keeps up with your pace, distance, speed, and routes. It also has a heart rate monitor that provides a continuous, accurate heart rate reading.

6. LETSCOM Smart Watch Fitness Tracker

LETSCOM Smart Watch Fitness Tracker

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Priced at far more economical than most of the other models on the market, this fitness watch is a more straightforward option.

It can monitor your heart rate and sleep, as well as track your workouts. You can also receive incoming call information from your phone on it as well as certain other notifications.

7. FITFORT Fitness Tracker

FITFORT Fitness Tracker

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This fitness tracker can track 14 different exercises, including running, riding, basketball, and tennis.

You can use it while swimming, and it is rated at IP68 waterproof. It can also send your reminders to drink more water or get up and move.

8. L8star Fitness Tracker

L8star Fitness Tracker

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Though it is much cheaper than most options, this tracker can track both your sleep and heart rate, on top of the usual fitness tracking.

It can be used for up to 30-days between charges and lasts up to 60-days on standby mode.

9. Lintelek Fitness Tracker

Lintelek Fitness Tracker

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This tiny fitness tracker can keep up with most of your everyday activities, including your steps and calories. It can also check your heart rate and connects with the “VeryFit Pro” app.

Furthermore, it has a long battery life and comes with a built-in USB plug

10. Fitbit Inspire Fitness Tracker

Fitbit Inspire Fitness Tracker

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Fitbit’s Inspire is one of the cheapest models that Fitbit makes. With that said, it still has quite a bit of functionality and can keep track of everything from your steps to your hourly activity.

It can also last up to 5-days before needing to be charged.

How We Ranked

We firstly rated each tracker on how well it can perform these essential functions. Does it count steps accurately? Does it have a built-in GPS, or does it require your phone to track distance? These were by far the most significant factors we considered when rating each device. Fitness trackers like the LETSCOM Smart Watch Fitness Tracker are both reliable and thus ranked well.

We also took into account which exercises each tracker could keep up with. Most can track common exercises like running and walking. But it was somewhat rarer to find a device that could track things like swimming and mountaineering. Each type of activity requires its kind of software to track accurately. The same program can not track mountaineering as running; it just isn’t going to work.

On top of tracking, most fitness trackers perform other functions as well. Some can sync with your phone to receive a notification, and sometimes you can even make calls. Usually, these extra features come with a hefty price tag, however. Most of the more popular brands, like the Fitbit, have many of these extras.

Because we were focused mostly on the fitness tracking side of things, we did not penalize products that couldn’t receive notifications from your phone. However, we did consider it a nice plus, especially if the device was priced on the lower side of things. This is a significant reason why the Garmin Fenix 5X Sapphire is rated #1.

Benefits

Fitness trackers for women can help you sleep better. The exact amount of sleep you need depends on your age, genetics, and environment. If you don’t get enough sleep, though, you could be faced with wide-reaching consequences. Sleep deprivation can have a severely detrimental effect on cognition, affecting everything from your alertness to your mood. Those who don’t get enough sleep perform lower on tests of attention, perception, memory, and executive function (1).

Scientists think that sleep deprivation of only an hour or two can negatively affect cognitive functions that rely on emotions to operate, which includes things like memory and perception. This is likely because not getting enough sleep affects your feelings and moods, which can color the way you see the world. Rational-based cognitive functions, like planning and decision-making, are typically not affected (1).

Furthermore, not getting enough sleep has been tied directly to a variety of diseases. Therapy revolving around helping patients get enough sleep has dramatically improved the mood of depressed patients and decreases tremors associated with Parkinson’s (2).

Many studies have also linked Alzheimer’s to sleep disturbances at night (3). These disturbances are not always recognized by the patients and decrease the overall level of sleep they get each night.

Luckily, many fitness trackers for women can measure and rate your sleep. They do this by monitoring your movements and even your heart rate in some cases. In many cases, you can use this data to figure out whether or not you’re getting enough sleep, which can significantly improve your cognitive function and reduce your risk of certain diseases.

Fitness trackers for women can improve motivation. Studies have found that the amount of motivation someone has is directly associated with how much they work out, even in a medical setting where the patients needed to exercise for clear medical reasons (4).

In other words, you need to want to work out, not just be told to. Even if you rationally know you should workout, you need a level of internal motivation to make that happen regularly. Fitness trackers for women can help this happen, to an extent. While no external device is going to grant you the motivation to workout magically, many fitness trackers come equipped with several features to push you in the right direction.

For example, watching the step meter fill-up as you walk around the block can be powerful motivation – more so than if you were just doing it by yourself. The majority of trackers allow you to set your own goals, which you can work towards each day. You’re much more likely to take a quick jog after dinner to reach your activity goal for the day if you have something on your wrist showing you that you need to do it.

Many fitness trackers also come with a social aspect, usually in the form of competing with friends or others with the same device as you. If you need a competitive push to stay motivated, this is a reliable option. Daily reminders to get outside and run can improve your motivation until, eventually, you don’t need to reminders anymore.

Fitness trackers for women can help you stay on top of your food and water intake. Whether you’re trying to lose weight or just stay healthy, fitness trackers can help you track your food quickly and easily. Inappropriate nutrition has been associated with almost every disease out there. Not eating enough vegetables, fruits, and whole grains has been connected the heart disease, for example (5).

Of course, some nutritional issues can also cause and reverse diabetes, which is controlled heavily through dietary interventions (6). The main problem with dietary interventions and preventions for diseases is that it is notoriously hard to keep up with what you eat. Many of us can hardly remember what we ate for breakfast, never mind eat the correct diet every day.

With a fitness tracker, though, you can keep track of what you eat and plan out your meals and snacks. You can often set your own nutritional goals, which is essential for preventing and improving any health conditions you might have.

You can also track your water intake, which is essential for a variety of reasons. Not getting enough water can affect your cognitive state, impair your overall endurance, and lower your strength (7). Even being slightly dehydrated can have some adverse effects on your cognitive and physical performance. Having a device on your wrists that can remind you to take another sip of water can be extremely helpful.

Fitness trackers for women can help your doctor. Fitness trackers provide a set of data on everything from your heart rate to even your blood oxygen saturation level in some cases. This means that your doctor might be able to use stats from your fitness tracker to help diagnose and treat many conditions that you might have. This is particularly helpful if your symptoms come and go, making it difficult for your doctor to view them in his office.

Of course, not all fitness trackers can be used for this purpose. To ensure that they’re accurate, each device has to be independently tested in a lab before most doctors will use them in their practice. Some brands have been used in scientific studies, which means they are accurate enough for these situations.

These brands include Fitbit, Garmin, Misfit, Apple, and Polar. That doesn’t mean that other brands aren’t careful, just that they haven’t been tested in this sort of scientific setting. The Fitbit brand seems to be used in most situations, which over twice as many studies using their devices and ten times as many clinical trials using them (8).

If you’re interested in using a fitness tracker to monitor any health problem you might be having, we recommend one of the Fitbit models we mention in our reviews section. This is the most thoroughly validated brand, which means it is most likely to be used in a medical situation. Of course, you should also talk with your doctor to see what brand he recommends, if any.

Side Effects

Fitness trackers for women aren’t associated with any long-term behavioral difference. A review of various studies and customer feedback found that over the long-run, fitness trackers aren’t associated with a behavioral change (9). While fitness trackers can help improve your motivation, they aren’t going to provide you with internal motivation, which is what you need for long-term success.

They can make tracking your exercise and nutrition much more comfortable, which improves the likelihood that you’re going to do it. They can also encourage you with reminders and social features. But they can’t make you do anything. Fitness trackers are only going to be as useful as you make them.

This internal motivation is not associated directly with fitness trackers. Some of those with fitness trackers do have the internal motivation necessary for change, while some without fitness trackers also have this inner motivation. You don’t have to have a fitness tracker to be motivated, hence this study’s finding. However, if you are internally motivated, a fitness tracker can help smooth down your fitness journey.

Fitness trackers for women might cause security problems. All fitness trackers mostly use Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) for communicating with your smartphone. This system is not very well encrypted, which can cause some security concerns. For example, the BLE address never changes, making it possible for users with a Bluetooth device to find it. Furthermore, the traffic of the signal goes up and down according to how much you’re exercising. Theoretically, someone could tell what sort of exercise you’re doing based on this signal (10).

Since you know how much activity the person with that sure BLE address is doing, you could identify them from a group of people and be able to follow their signal to find them at a later time. This is a big concern. However, there have not been any crimes or similar instances using these devices.

Fitness trackers for women aren’t always accurate. All fitness trackers come with different levels of accuracy. However, the accuracy of a single device can change radically from day to day and person to person. Fitness trackers fit some people better. If you wear a fitness tracker that doesn’t provide you, it probably won’t be as accurate as it could be otherwise.

Similarly, most fitness trackers require you to perform specific actions to sync them correctly. However, people change over time, which means that your tracker might become less accurate than when you first purchased it. Therefore, you may need to do these actions regularly to keep your device accurate.

It is not enough to simply rely on your intuition to figure out whether or not your tracker is accurate. One study found that users were usually wrong about how accurate their fitness trackers were. They often performed “tests” to figure out how reliable their devices were being, like counting the number of steps they took and then comparing it to their tracker.

However, these tests were often inaccurate in themselves and did not give a clear overview as to how accurate their device was overall. In other words, while the tracker might be reading how many steps you’re taking correctly, it might be getting the number of calories you’ve burned completely wrong (11).

Recommended Usage

The more you wear your fitness tracker for women, the more you’re going to get out of it. Fitness trackers shine in their ability to measure everyday actions that you might not think of otherwise. They translate taking the stairs instead of the elevator into the progress you can see on your wrist. However, if you aren’t wearing your tracker all the time, it isn’t going to be able to keep up with these small, everyday actions. This can give you inaccurate data at the end of the day and means you can’t be sure whether or not you’ve hit your goals.

While it is essential to wear your tracker as much during the day as possible, you should also wear the tracker at night. Many trackers can keep up with your sleep, which is an essential consideration for those who might have sleep-related problems. Sleep deprivation, even at shallow levels, is associated with several adverse outcomes, as we have discussed.

Of course, if you’re wearing your tracker all day and all night, you aren’t going to be able to charge it appropriately. Luckily, most trackers have long battery lives, so you shouldn’t have to charge them very often. However, you will have to charge them at some point. We recommend charging your device when you aren’t going to be moving much, like in the evening when you’re plopped in front of the TV.

FAQ

Which women’s fitness tracker is best? Out of all the trackers we looked at, the Garmin Fenix 5X Sapphire was the best. It is inexpensive compared to other similar models and has a lot of functionality. It comes with its GPS, which it uses to provide you with full-color topography maps while you’re running and route cycling maps. It has a rugged design and is made of stainless steel. If you run a low, we particularly recommend this model, as it comes with multiple running programs, allowing it to track your workout as accurately as possible.

What is the best Fitbit watch for a woman? If you’re stuck on getting a Fitbit, we recommend the Fitbit Inspire HR Heart Rate & Fitness Tracker. This is one of the less expensive Fitbit devices, but it comes with plenty of features. Because of this, we consider it to be one of the best based on the cost/benefit ratio. You get a lot in this small, inexpensive package.

It tracks your heart rate 24/7, allowing it to determine an accurate calorie burn rate and heart rate zones for workouts. It can also keep up with all the necessary fitness metrics, like steps, distance, hourly activity, active minutes, and the number of calories you’re burned.

Which fitness tracker is best for me? When choosing a fitness tracker, you should have a clear picture of what you’re planning on using it for. If you want to track your running correctly, be sure to get one like the Garmin Fenix 5X Sapphire that has plenty of run tracking options. If you’re more concerned about your overall wellness, consider getting one with quality sleep and food tracking. For swimming, be sure to pick one out that is waterproof. Otherwise, you won’t be able to use it in the pool.

For those that use certain apps already, you may be able to find fitness trackers that can sync with the app you’re already using. This is extremely helpful and is something to keep an eye out for. If you don’t currently have an app that you use but are thinking about getting one, many fitness trackers come with the apps that work alongside them.

Which fitness tracker is best for small wrists? There are quite a few fitness trackers available for smaller wrists, like the Fitbit Inspire HR Heart Rate & Fitness Tracker. This tracker is smaller than most, so it won’t completely overwhelm your wrist. Plus, it is also quite lightweight, which is something to keep in mind if your wrist is smaller. Of course, there are quite a few other options that are smaller as well.

One thing to keep in mind if your wrists are small is that not only does the fit of the wristband matter, but the bulk of the watch’s face matters too. If your wrist is small, broad watch faces can rub up against your bones, which can cause significant difficulties.

If you’re having difficulties finding a watch that fits even after these suggestions, you may want to consider getting a fitness tracker that isn’t a watch at all. They do make fitness trackers that are necklaces, like the Bellabeat Leaf Nature Smart Jewelry Health Tracker. These trackers work very similarly to those you wear on your wrist, only you wear them around your neck instead of around your wrists.

What is better than Fitbit fitness tracker? Fitbit is the best-known name for fitness trackers out there. However, we did find a few better ones out there, mainly if you’re mostly concerned about the fitness tracking side of things. For example, we found that one of the best fitness trackers out there is the Garmin Fenix 5X Sapphire. It is more expensive, but it has all the features you could ask for and more. It can track practically any sort of exercise and is made out of extremely durable material.

If you’re looking for something a little different, we also ranked the Bellabeat Leaf Nature Smart Jewelry Health Tracker over the Fitbit models. It can be worn on your wrists or as a necklace. This device is more aimed at health tracking than exercise tracking, making it a perfect choice if you’re just looking to increase your overall wellness.

Do Fitbits fitness trackers really work? Generally speaking, Fitbits really do work. They can track your steps accurately, as well as other metrics like your calories burned. Of course, no fitness tracker is going to be 100% accurate. With that said, the Fitbit is reliable enough that it has been used in several clinical trials. It is one of the most thoroughly tested fitness trackers on the market, so if you’re particularly worried about accuracy, you should probably get a Fitbit.

Out of the models we looked at, the Fitbit Inspire HR Heart Rate & Fitness Tracker was one of the best ones. It is less expensive than the other models and still comes with many of the tracking features you need. It can also sync with your phone to get notifications. We also liked the Fitbit Versa Smart Watch, which is a little bit more expensive. However, it comes with some better features, so it might be worth considering.

Is wearing a Fitbit fitness tracker dangerous? There is no evidence that wearing a Fitbit is dangerous in any sense. While there have been some debates around the Bluetooth radiation that fitness trackers produce, there is no evidence that this tiny bit of radiation is dangerous. We encounter radiation every day, including from natural sources. The argument that human bodies are designed to handle any radiation just isn’t valid.

A fitness tracker is only going to add very little to the amount of radiation you receive every day – so small it likely won’t matter.

Should I wear my fitness tracker to bed? Yes. One of the primary purposes of a fitness tracker is to keep up with your sleep.  If you’re mostly focused on tracking your workouts, this might not seem like a big deal. However, the quality of your sleep affects nearly every part of your life, so it is essential to ensure that you’re sleeping enough.

As we discussed earlier, sleep deprivation is associated with several health consequences and diseases. Because of that, wearing your fitness tracker at night can be very helpful to prevent certain disorders and increase your overall wellbeing.

How long do fitness trackers last? It depends on the quality of the fitness tracker you purchase, as well as how much wear-and-tear it must withstand every day. Generally, more expensive models are going to outlive their cheaper counterparts. However, this is not always true. Some of the less costly trackers are quite durable, while the less expensive models sadly are not in some cases.

One of the major concerns when it comes to the durability of a tracker is how long the battery lasts. In most cases, trackers aren’t destroyed outright and don’t just fall apart. Instead, the battery is usually the first thing to go. You might go from needing to charger your fitness tracker once a week to every other day. Eventually, the battery might refuse to hold a charge at all.

To see how long a particular fitness tracker might last, read the customer reviews.  Generally, other customers will report if their device wore down quickly or not. You can also glance at the company’s warranty. If they have a more extended warranty, you can bet that their device probably lasts for a decent amount of time.

How often should I charge my fitness tracker? Different fitness trackers have different battery lives. Some can last for about four days, while others can last for a whole week. With that said, the vast majority of them can last for quite a while in between charges. Even if a tracker starts out holding a charge for a while, the battery might lose some of its oomph over time, which means you may have to charge it more often.

We recommend charging your tracker in the evenings when you aren’t going to be doing much moving around. That way, you don’t miss out on counting steps or calories burned. If you charge your tracker at night, you’ll miss out on tracking your sleep, which is one of the best features trackers usually come with.

Is a fitness tracker worth buying?  A fitness tracker can be accommodating for keeping track of your workouts and providing reminders to get up and move or drink water. However, if you ignore those reminders, you aren’t going to get much use out of a fitness tracker. Luckily, if you aren’t sure whether or not you’ll get much out of one, you can purchase a cheaper option. That way, you won’t be out much money if you figure out that you don’t enjoy using the tracker. With that said, there is something good to be said about the more expensive models. They can often receive notifications and calls from your phone, which can encourage you to keep using it.

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Recap

Fitness trackers for women can be a helpful way to keep track of your workouts and everyday activities. Many can track metrics like your steps and the distance you’ve walked for the day.

These trackers can help also you find that last burst of motivation you need to stick to your routine.

For Fitbug’s #1 recommended fitness tracker for women, click here.

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